


we're connected without an end

by orphan_account



Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe, Falling In Love, Flashbacks, M/M, Psychic Bond, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2019-11-26 13:55:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18181478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: In three thousand years, their home will burn.After arriving on Earth to begin assimilation, Hoseok meets Changkyun and learns what it means to be human, while Hyungwon and Hyunwoo suffer the aftereffects.Based off of my interpretation of the NCT U – Without U MV.





	we're connected without an end

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ouvertes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ouvertes/gifts).



> I hope you like what I came up with! Enjoy!

The skin they give Hyungwon feels too tight, like it’s been shrink-wrapped around his bones.

His veins are a sunset of purples, yellows, and blues, leaking through his glassy wrist as inky liquid drains from the IV bag into his arm. The table beneath him is cold like the prick of a needle, and the atmosphere inside the medical bay feels thick and gaseous with the chemicals needed to sustain this new body.

He looks to his left. An attendant, silent and faceless, removes the IV from Hyunwoo’s arm. It’s odd seeing him in his new form. His skin is sun kissed and lifelike, sinewy muscle shifting in his back as he rises from the table. He looks so human. Hyunwoo pokes at the flesh where the needle was and the puncture wound closes. He flexes and unflexes his fist.

“How does it feel?” Hyungwon asks, but he already knows. His voice sounds weak and muffled, unused.

“Strange,” Hyunwoo says. He's always had a tendency towards one worded answers.

Hyungwon chews nervously on the inside of his cheek. “Have they fitted you for your component?”

Hyunwoo turns and rubs the base of his skull. The component, nearly unnoticeable, juts out near his neck. As he prods it with his fingers, it glows a faint blue just underneath his skin, bioluminescent.

The attendant returns and removes the needle from Hyungwon’s arm with deft fingers. He sits up and breathing seems a little easier, like his lungs are finally settling inside his ribcage.

There are hundreds of them, just like Hyungwon, spread out on medical tables, their bodies half-formed like plasticine dolls. Hyungwon closes his eyes and he can hear them, the hum of the hive that connects them all, the psychic link.

Hyungwon can hear Hoseok too, somewhere down below on solid ground. He feels the pulsing of his blood in his heart, the taste of something sweet on his tongue. He sees a room bathed in burnt orange light and it reminds him of the star threatening to set fire to their home. The countdown is a spectre in the back of mind. Three thousand years left. Hyungwon calls out to Hoseok, but he receives no answer.

The distance between them swells.

In a darkened corridor, lined with steps, Hyungwon passes by the faceless figures, all dressed in stark white button downs and black trousers, their arms stiff at their sides and their footsteps all in perfect synchronicity, ringing out like the hollow beat of a drum. Somehow, Hyungwon feels disconnected from them. The disconnect frightens him more than the mission ahead, more than the prospect of never being able to return home. They have always been linked.

With a hiss, the door opens, the pressure changing all around him, causing his hair to stand on end and a shiver to run along his spine like a shock of ice water. Hyungwon closes his eyes and the light pours over him.

He steps onto the street and breathes in the earth, musty with the smell of wet pavement, high rises like concrete trees towering up above him. It’s the first day of spring, and this must be Seoul.

_Can you hear me?_

Hoseok answers for the first time in a long time. Hyungwon can hear the laugh in his throat.

_I can feel you._

*

When Hoseok met Changkyun, he had been on his own for nearly a year.

His apartment was sparse, nothing more than a cramped communal space, an even smaller bedroom, one disused bathroom and a kitchen, tile floor cracked and refrigerator left empty. Hoseok slept on a mattress in the corner without bedsheets, his only companion a shrivelled house plant that sat on the windowsill above him. It looked out onto the city skyline, skyscrapers lit up like glinting fairy lights wound around a tree.

Hoseok had been trying to revive the plant for weeks to no avail. Its leaves remained a muddy green, dry and frail to the touch. He was unfamiliar with these things, water and sunlight, dirt that dug under his fingernails as he poked at the plant’s tangled roots.

He was trying to get used to what the word _human_ meant. Sometimes, it meant soil on his palms and grass scratching at his ankles, the warm kiss of sun on the back of his neck. Other times, it was cracks in the sidewalk wriggling with ants, the smell of gasoline, the static of a television screen. He could only guess how these things seemed to coexist, but his mission was merely to assimilate and observe, not decipher.

As night closed in, Hoseok found a semblance of comfort in the anonymity of the Seoul streets, his hoodie that felt too scratchy for his new skin pulled up around his face. The smell of street food filled his nostrils as he passed by rows of shops and stared at pixelated billboards flashing advertisements for one thing or another; hand cream, luxury watches, blue jeans, fast food.

Hoseok could hear a woman laughing as she chatted to someone on her cellphone. A baby in a stroller cried somewhere down the street. A group of high school students erupted into laughter, running after one another. There were too many faces for Hoseok to memorize.

The world was too loud sometimes. Everything about his human body was warm and consuming and unfamiliar, like he might burst past his seams at any moment. It was still too foreign, unlike the body he owned before. He tapped his fingers against his thigh, wiggled his toes in his sneakers, breathed and blinked and brushed his hands through his hair.

A strange feeling bubbled up in his throat, and he heard the voices of the others buzzing in the back of his brain, too indistinct to make out, unable to isolate just one and listen. They were too far away. Even amongst the humans that bustled through the street, nattering like insects, Hoseok felt alone.

He ducked into the nearest shop to escape, holding his breath until the panic that slid up his esophagus began to fade away. He nearly backed into a shelving unit lined with records, stumbling and catching himself before he could fall.

From across the shop, the cashier looked up from a stack of CDs he was organizing. Straight eyebrows stitched with concern, he leaned forwards to peer over the counter, so much so that his feet left the ground.

“Can I help you find anything?” he asked, rounded glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose.

Hoseok blinked at him, unable to respond. His component had been preprogrammed to translate human language, but the sound of the cashier’s voice still felt stilted and strange in his ears. Either that, or he was startled to be spoken to after so long. It had been months.

“No, I’m fine,” was all he could muster.

The cashier nodded, his mussed fringe falling into his face. It was dyed a dull grey that might have been silver at one time, the colour faded from one too many washes. He went back to his CDs, flipping them over to read the track lists and scribbling something down in a notepad beside him.

Hoseok considered leaving, but something compelled him to step further into the shop. Maybe it was the prospect of conversation, or sharing a quiet space with another living being. A dying plant can only do so much.

Hoseok ran a hand over the records stacked inside individual crates. He picked one up and examined it up close. The record sleeve was worn and musty, dusty against his fingertips. He had seen something like this on TV before. Most nights he stayed up until the first drips of daylight seeped through the clouds, just flipping between channels; the news, reruns of daytime soap operas, and sometimes a film or two, relics of another time, black and white, the picture gritty like sandpaper.

“That one is shit.”

Hoseok looked up to see the cashier standing beside him, thumbing through another crate of records. He pulled one out, the cover nearly identical to the one Hoseok was holding. Hoseok eyed his name tag.

HELLO MY NAME IS: CHANGKYUN

“The Japanese pressing is better,” Changkyun said and passed the record to Hoseok, pointing down at it. “It has a cleaner mix.”

“Oh,” Hoseok stumbled over his own words, understanding none of Changkyun’s. “Thanks.”

Hesitant, Hoseok pulled the record out from the sleeve. It caught the light, black and glossy like beach glass. Hoseok touched the surface of the vinyl and he could feel every bump, every groove, imagining how the sound would hum and swallow up the voices that were murmuring unintelligibly to him now. His skin buzzed. Changkyun began to walk back to the counter when Hoseok found himself speaking again.

“Could you, uh, show me how it works?”

Changkyun shot him a confused look, but it soon shifted into a smile. “Yeah, sure.”

Changkyun put on the record. It crackled and spat, and then the smooth drone of a saxophone poured through the speakers. Hoseok felt his heart seize and flutter. It was unlike anything he had ever heard before. Unlike anything he had ever felt.

Changkyun looked at him, a languid smirk upturning the corners of his mouth, but his eyes were warm, brown like roasted chestnuts. “You’re not from here, are you?”

Hoseok swallowed nervously, but he knew full well Changkyun meant something else by it. “How could you tell?”

Changkyun shrugged. “I guess you seemed a little lost.”

*

The bitter taste of espresso, indistinct chatter, hot ceramic and milky foam fizzing like soap bubbles in dishwater. He smiles and the boy beside him catches that smile with his lips, drags his mouth just under his ear and whispers something inaudible. He lifts his coffee with jittery hands and writes something on a napkin in smudgy pen. A scribbled heart leaks. Fingerprints in blue ink.

Hyunwoo wakes up to burning palms and a flush on the back of his neck.

Something sick and melancholic settles in his stomach, a feeling that Hyunwoo previously had no words to describe. He slowly sits up in bed, mattress springs creaking underneath his weight as he stands barefooted on the carpet. He retreats to the bathroom to splash water onto his face.

It stings. He cringes. The water drips down his chin to stain the front of his tank top.

The faint chatter in the back of his mind grows quieter the longer the tap runs, sloshing around in the drain. Hyunwoo stares into the bottom of the sink, trying to decipher whether what he saw was a dream or a side effect of the link.

Hyunwoo looks at himself in the mirror, eyes tired and lined with dark purple, veins showing through the thin skin. Inexplicably, the ambience creeps back up on him, crowding into his ears like someone is shoving balls of cotton inside his head.

He shuts his eyes, and when he opens them again he sees Hoseok in the periphery of the mirror. The sun is cast onto the wall of an unfamiliar room in elongated slots, dustlight swimming in the air as Hoseok sways back and forth. Hyunwoo hears music; a soft tinkle of piano, legato trumpets, the crooning voice of a woman as she sings about how beautiful the moon looked the night she fell in love.  

_Love?_

Hyunwoo feels a warmth spread through his middle as another person comes into view; newly bleached hair and rounded glasses, oversized hoodie and jeans with holes in the knees. He laughs when he sees Hoseok dancing. After some goading he joins in, taking Hoseok by the hand. Hyunwoo feels the pressure on his own palm and his eyes nearly well at the gentleness of the gesture. Something weighs down heavy on his new heart, something he doesn’t fully understand, threatening to crush in his ribcage.

The feeling soon becomes too much. Hyunwoo reaches over to open the medicine cabinet mirror, then slams it closed again. It breaks with the force of it, shattered pieces of mirror falling into the sink with a deafening clatter.

When Hyunwoo looks behind him, Hoseok is gone.

He tries to clear his head, only to find Hyungwon there.

_Hyungwon?_

With the call of his voice, he feels Hyungwon shift. He sees a hallway, carpet stained, dim lights flickering, and it looks like the one outside of his apartment. Someone knocks on his front door.

_I felt it too._

*

Hoseok was taken by the music almost as much as he was taken by Changkyun himself.

He found his way back to the record shop on a Monday, then on a Tuesday, then a Wednesday, and over again. Changkyun played him a vast selection of different records; everything from punk to ska to jazz to folk, and in every language imaginable.

Changkyun had a way about him. His humour was dry and witty, and he seemed to know more about humanity than Hoseok could ever learn just by watching television. He saw in Changkyun how humans smiled and laughed and loved and felt and thought. Changkyun grinned with his tongue between his teeth, laughed with his mouth wide open and his head tilted back, high-pitched or low-pitched with no in-between.

After Changkyun locked up the record shop, they walked together through Hongdae, the streetlights casting their shadows onto the rain speckled pavement. Half of the city was getting ready for bed, while the other half squeezed their way into lines for bars and nightclubs, fingers crossed for cheap liquor and maybe someone to hold at the end of the night. Meanwhile, Hoseok and Changkyun ambled, feeling like wanderers yet to find their place.

“So why did you come to Seoul?” Changkyun asked, keeping in step beside him.

A naïve part of Hoseok wished he could tell Changkyun the truth. He settled for a half lie. “I thought it might be an adventure.”

Changkyun smiled, eyes crinkling at the corners. “Has it been?”

“So far, yeah.” Hoseok felt his cheeks grow warm, and it was such an unfamiliar feeling that it nearly startled him. “I think so.”

“Sometimes I feel a bit claustrophobic here,” Changkyun said as they reached his apartment. “This city is where I grew up. I know it inside and out. Sometimes it feels like I know it too well.”

They stood there for a moment, Hoseok formulating his inevitable goodbye. Changkyun suddenly looked unsure of himself, staring at the space in between his cherry red Converse.

“Hey, can I show you something?” he asked.

Hoseok nodded.

They climbed the stairs all the way up to the apartment rooftop, laughing away like mad children, thoroughly out of breath, the sound of their footsteps echoing off the walls of the stairwell as they ran. Changkyun in the lead. Hoseok close behind. As Changkyun pushed the door open and they broke out onto the roof, he let out a euphoric shout, scaring the pigeons perched on the railing. They scrambled away, taking flight into the dusty blue sky that was caught somewhere between sunset and night.

Hoseok almost doubled over in laughter, but Changkyun caught him before he could fall, slinging one arm around his shoulder. Hoseok allowed himself to lean into him, and they looked out into the vast city skyline in front of them, alight like thousands of petrified lightning bugs.

“Maybe I just don’t know what home is yet,” Changkyun said.

Hoseok grinned. “Me neither.”

*

_This is not what we were sent here for._

_Then what were we sent here for?_

_To live with humankind._

_Love is human._

_We never asked to feel love._

_I never asked to feel human._

Hyungwon drags his fingers down to his wrist and pinches the skin there until it blooms pink. He feels the dig of a needle, the wet slip of ink, a droplet of blood as it rises to the surface, but his wrist remains unblemished.

Hoseok is with him, the boy Hyunwoo saw, the boy Hyungwon felt pass through him like a vaporous apparition; Changkyun. He smiles, eyes never straying from Hoseok as the man sitting across from them guides the tattoo needle over Hoseok’s skin. Hoseok tenses and Hyungwon feels his tendons snap. It itches. He digs his nails into his own wrist, but they leave no mark. He thumbs at the component on the back of his neck, desperate to dig it out just to numb himself from it.

Changkyun is right there beside Hoseok, and their fingers interlock, fitting so easily together.

Hyungwon wonders what it would be like to hold Changkyun’s hand, to really hold it, not just experience the dizzying aftereffects of a distant touch. That same strange feeling churns his stomach, not unpleasantly, but it feels catastrophic, like if he looks too close this could all end in disaster.

Hyungwon looks at Changkyun through Hoseok’s eyes and it feels like drowning, warmth filling up his lungs, his body forced down under the surface by the weight of it.

Changkyun pulls him into the deep. There is no way to claw himself out.

*

Hoseok kissed Changkyun for the first time on the rooftop.

Sunsets were something he could never wrap his head around; the flossy pinks and pale oranges, inky blue around the edges, the stars dotting the dark like glinting shards of a broken mirror. Hoseok thought that maybe he could open his mouth and swallow up the wispy clouds in one breath. Maybe they would taste like sugar, dissolving on his tongue.

They reminded him of supernovas, dying stars, the swirling nodules of gas planets in the farthest reaches of the universe. But here on Earth the sky was almost tangible, like he could reach out and touch it. As if something so beautiful could fall right into the centre of his palm.

Changkyun was nursing a bottle of soju between two fingers. He offered it to Hoseok, but he only shook his head, waving it away. Hoseok turned back towards the sky, staring off into space.

“What are you thinking about?” Changkyun asked and leaned up against the railing.

Hoseok sat back from the ledge, propped up on his elbows to get a better view. “Home,” he said wistfully.

“What about it?” Changkyun asked.

Hoseok looked at Changkyun, a small smile on his face. “I’m not sure I want to go back.”

“You really like it here?”

Hoseok nodded. “I like being here with you. Back home, I felt like I was part of something, but it never meant anything more than survival. If that makes any sense.”

“Not really.” Changkyun laughed through his nose.

By now, he was used to Hoseok’s occasional idiosyncrasies, but after a moment he appeared like he was chewing on another answer. He apparently decided against it, setting the bottle of soju on the ground and laying down beside Hoseok to look at the clouds.

“I want to go to Tibet."

“Where’s that?”

Changkyun dragged his finger across the sky, tracing the edge of an especially plump cloud. “Somewhere in the mountains, near the Himalayas. Where the tigers are.”

Hoseok frowned. “What’s wrong with here?”

“Korean tigers went extinct centuries ago,” Changkyun deadpanned.

Hoseok shot Changkyun a look.

Changkyun smirked. “I dunno,” he said with a sigh, suddenly serious, his eyes trained upwards. “Sometimes when you stay in a place too long you start to wonder about what you’re missing out on.”

If he could, Hoseok would show Changkyun the stars, guide him through the milky way and back again, past red dwarfs and blue giants. But none of that compared to watching the sunset fall over a place you could call home. Hoseok wished Changkyun could see that. He wanted Changkyun to feel what he felt when he looked at him, watching the fruit punch coloured sunlight pour over his cheeks, simmering in his half lidded eyes.

But, unlike with the others, there would always be that disconnect.

Hoseok felt his heart sink deeper and deeper inside his chest, swallowed by what he imagined was sticky and blackened goo, when Changkyun moved. He turned to face him, their noses barely an inch apart. His hand came up to cup Hoseok’s cheek, thumb resting against his jaw, fingertips splayed in his hair.

It was the first time Hoseok had ever been touched, truly touched, flesh on flesh, a part of him and a part of someone else. It was tangible, more real than garbled voices and distorted visions bubbling just under the surface of his eyes.   

Hoseok felt his skin sing when Changkyun leaned in to kiss him, like something was finally slotting into place.

_Home._

*

_This place is not a home._

_I love him._

_I know._

_I feel it too._

_Then why?_

_We have no choice._

_Humanity was never meant for us._

Hoseok manages a smile as he picks up the plant from the windowsill. The leaves are soft between his fingers, green and glossy in the sunlight that streams through the blinds.

He looks over at Changkyun who is asleep in his bed, one end of the bedsheet woven around his ankle. His breath is steady, in and out and out and in, and it acts to calm Hoseok as his eyes trace his mussed up hair, the freckles on his neck splattered like brown flecks of paint, the shadow of his eyelashes cast upon summer flushed cheeks.

This is the last time he’ll see him this way. Hoseok drains the moment for all it’s worth, sitting on the edge of the bed, careful not to wake him. He sets the plant down in his lap and the moistened soil slicks his palms.

It spreads to his neck as he thumbs at his component, fiddling with it until it loosens with a suctioned pop, falling into his hand. The world around him sounds muffled, like he’s sinking down beneath the water. It makes the voices all the more clear.

_Time to go._

Hoseok nods. He stands and sets the plant back onto the windowsill. Changkyun shifts in his sleep.

_I wish I could take you with me._

Hoseok knows the others can hear, but they say nothing. He closes his eyes and feels tears on his face. Not his own.

Hoseok walks to the hallway, opens the door, breathes. He hears Changkyun say something to him from the bedroom, but he no longer understands. The words sound garbled, incomprehensible.

The door closes behind him.   

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading :-)


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